The Shadows Fall (1826 - 1827)

C H A P T E R I

The Shadows Fall

[ 1826—1827 ]

T is doubtful whether Adoniram himself ever knew quite how

he got through the next few weeks. After the first “bitter, heartrending anguish,” he was able to comfort himself to a certain extent with the Gospel’s assurance that Nancy’s spirit was rejoicing with the angels. But even so, the pain was almost too much to bear.

There was no reason to leave Ava, so he remained with the embassy. He could do nothing for Nancy. She had been buried a month before he had known she was dead. He could do nothing for little Maria. She was receiving better care than he could give her himself.

Three days after the news of Nancy’s death, Price’s wife died of cholera morbus. She had been far advanced in pregnancy, and the disease had induced premature labor. She lived only a few hours after its onset, the baby remaining unborn. Such a combination of circumstances placed the court in a peculiar dilemma. Price was a servant of the king’s, and as such a spectacular public funeral for his wife’s remains was obligatory. On the other hand, Burmese law forbade any ceremony at all to a victim of cholera; and to complicate the problem, custom required that the body of a woman dying in labor without giving birth be treated in a certain especially gruesome manner and then buried privately, even furtively.

The dilemma was resolved in typical court style. Official announcement was made that Mrs. Price had died in childbirth after delivering the child. The appropriate public rites were then carried out with great and impressive solemnity. Price himself, weakened by imprisonment, was to die of tuberculosis in little more than a year. Nor was Rodgers to live much longer. The Death Prison and Oungpen-La were exacting their first toll.

Meanwhile the Crawfurd embassy dragged on to the conclusion of a nearly meaningless commercial treaty, Adoniram keeping himself mechanically busy with translating. On December 13, 1826, about three weeks after the arrival of the black-sealed letter, the embassy started down the Irrawaddy. Low water and frequent strandings of the Diana on sand bars made a slow passage, while Adoniram fretted.

By this time' his profound grief had dulled to a persistent ache — he even, perhaps, entertained a bewildered feeling that the letter, with its awful meaning, was in some way unreal. His sense of reality told him that he would never see Nancy again. But another part of him insisted just as stubbornly that she would be waiting to greet him at Amherst—for printed on his memory for all time was his last sight of her in front of Captain Fenwick’s house, little Maria in her arms, smiling cheerfully. He knew this feeling was a delusion, but he could not shake it off.

Rangoon turned out to be beleaguered on all sides by Peguan rebels. For those on the armed steamboat, entry into the city by a ladder to the wharf was easy, but it was impossible to go outside the encircling defensive stockade. Here in the intervals between his official duties Adoniram asked about little Maria, but no one could give him any word. His old teacher, Maung Shway-gnong, had died of cholera on the way down from Ava.

The mission house was too close to Peguan muskets for Adoniram to visit, but by climbing on a high roof inside the stockade he could catch a glimpse of it. This building was a ruin. Only the posts and part of the roof were left. All the houses outside the stockade and along the river had been destroyed. Brushes between Peguans and Burmans occurred frequently; and one fair-sized sortie or small battle for possession of the Shwe Dagon pagoda took place the day of the embassy’s arrival. After the few obligatory ceremonial courtesies with Rangoon officialdom there was no reason for the embassy to stay. The Diana paddled on down the river, and on January 24, 1827, dropped Adoniram at Amherst.

Jonathan Wade was waiting to meet him at the landing place; it was Wade and his wife Deborah who had sailed with Nancy from Philadelphia more than three years before. They had barely escaped with their lives from Rangoon at the outbreak of the war and, Wade told Adoniram, had returned to Amherst about a month after Nancy’s death. They had moved at once into the house Nancy had built and immediately taken charge of little Maria. She was still alive, but very feeble, said Wade.

As Adoniram and Wade walked together to the house, the converts —- the two men Maung Shway-bay and the faithful Maung Ing, and the two women Mah Men-lay and Mah Doke —- ran out to meet him, the men weeping and the women wailing and loudly lamenting. Their distress brought Adoniram sharply back to reality. All at once his sorrow grew fresh as on the day he received the blacksealed letter.

His grief swelled when, on the veranda, instead of Nancy, he saw Deborah Wade holding little Maria in her arms, “a poor little puny child, who could not recognize her weeping father, and from whose infant mind had long been erased all recollection of the mother who loved her so much.” He tried to take the baby in his arms, but she shrank away.

Rebuffed, he asked Wade to show him Nancy’s grave. It was almost next door, in front of a house Henry Gouger had built during Adoniram’s absence, close by the garden. A hopia tree or “hopetree,” grew at the head of the grave and a crude fence had been constructed around it.

He looked at it awhile, lost in a confusion of thoughts and memories. “But who ever obtained comfort there?” he wrote bitterly a few days later to Nancy’s mother. He knew Nancy’s body must be under the hope-tree. They had told him so. But he could not see her. He could not hear her voice.

He turned from the grave and walked to Captain Fenwick’s house, where she had been living when he went away with Crawfurd. He looked at the place where they had knelt in prayer before he had left, and where he had kissed her in farewell. He could see the place. He remembered the farewell. But there was no Nancy now.

He returned to the house she had built during his absence, where he would live by himself. He climbed the stairs to the room where she had died. From the window he could see the hope-tree and the top of the fence. Every moment he half expected to see her, or at least hear her voice or footstep. But every sound was made by others: his own slow footSteps, little Maria’s wailing, the quiet movements of the Wades. There was no Nancy.

He asked for Dr. Richardson, who had attended her. But Richardson had moved to Moulmein. He plied the Burman disciples with questions, as if cross-examination could somehow force answers that might magically bring her back.

They told him that Nancy had said little during her illness. Her mind had seemed to be affected and sometimes her thoughts wandered. But they did remember her saying, “The teacher is long in coming and the new missionaries are long in coming. I must die alone and leave my little one, but as it is the will of God, I acquiesce in His will. I am not afraid of death, but I am afraid I shall not be able to bear these pains. Tell the teacher that the disease was most violent and I could not write. Tell him how I suffered and died. Tell him all that you see; and take care of the house and things until he returns.”

When she was scarcely aware of anything else, she would still call for little Maria, who was being cared for by Mrs. Whitlock, wife of an officer and the only European woman in Amherst. When Mrs. Whitlock would bring the baby, Nancy would tell her again and again to be kind to it and be sure it had everything it wanted until its father should return. But the last few days she did not even do this. She lay on one side without moving, apparently almost unconscious, her head on her arm, her eyes closed. About eight o’clock one evening she gave an exclamation of distress or pain in Burmese and at that moment stopped breathing.

This was all the disciples could tell Adoniram.

He was dissatisfied. He wished Henry Gouger were still in Amherst. But Sir Archibald Campbell had decided that a place opposite Martaban called “Maulamyaing” or “Moulmein,” some twenty-five miles upstream where the Salween was met by two smaller rivers in a lakelike islanded confluence, offered a better military location than Amherst even though it lacked a harbor for large vessels. When Campbell made Moulmein his headquarters, Amherst began to lose population. Gouger, in spite of his house and several months’ service as a magistrate there, had decided to leave Amherst to its fate. He had departed from Burma forever. His wealth Still remained in Ava, uncollectable. His health had been damaged. But he was young, with mOSt of his life still ahead of him. He was content to leave the past behind and start again somewhere else.

Gouger being unavailable, Adoniram decided to visit Moulmein at the first opportunity and see Dr. Richardson. Meanwhile he mechanically resumed his missionary duties on Sunday, January 28, 1827 —four days after his return—by recommencing worship in Burmese. Only about 20 people were present, but it was the first Burmese service he had held in two and a half years. A few days later the little Burmese girl “Abby Hasseltine” died —-the younger of Maung Shway-bay’s two daughters who had lived with Nancy through the war years in Ava and Oung-pen-la. After the funeral, Adoniram began to pick up the threads of his partial translation of the Old Testament.

Early the next week Adoniram carried out his intention of visiting Dr. Richardson. He was well impressed, both as to the doctor’s competence and his kindness and attentiveness to patients. Richardson told him that he had seen Nancy twice a day and had sometimes spent most of the night by her bed. From the beginning, he said, Nancy had been certain she would not recover; but even in the face of death “her mind was uniformly tranquil and happy.” She seemed to regret most leaving Maria, the converts and the school before Adoniram or some other missionary could arrive. But she seldom complained even about this. Her laSt two days, said Richardson, she had no pain and her attention seemed to be turned inward so that it was necessary to question her again and again about how she felt before she would arouse enough to answer. But she did say, “I feel quite well, only very weak.” These were the last words Richardson heard her speak.

The doctor was certain that Amherst’s climate had nothing to do with her death. In his opinion, the real cause was exhaustion from the privations of Ava and Oung-pen-la.

Not only did Dr. Richardson confirm the disciples’ account; more important, he allayed a certain feeling of guilt that had troubled Adoniram since the day of the black-sealed letter—a feeling that if he had been present he might somehow have been able to prolong Nancy’s life. Now he was convinced—at least consciously—that his absence had contributed nothing toward her death.

With his guilty feelings about Nancy’s death abated at least temporarily, Adoniram plunged once again into the work of the mission, hoping that time and activity would heal the remainder of his sorrow. There was certainly plenty to do. Some of the Amherst natives were showing interest in the Gospel. Another building was begun for a school. A great deal of work was put into clearing trees and brush from the mission premises. Maung Ing, appointed a teacher and preacher by his own request, went off down the southward coast to Tavoy to spread the Word.

Meanwhile, under Mrs. Wade’s tender care little Maria began to improve until Adoniram thought with a mixture of gratitude and regret that the baby believed Mrs. Wade was her own mother. But the improvement was only temporary. Maria suffered a bowel complaint; recovered again; then, in April, relapsed. Adoniram and Mrs. Wade took her to Dr. Richardson in “Maulmain” (Moulmein). The doctor could do little, and on the twentieth, after some days in Moulmein, they returned to Amherst.

During their absence two new missionaries had arrived at Amherst and installed themselves—George Dana Boardman and his beautiful blue-eyed wife Sarah, with their own baby girl, barely six months old. But though the meeting with the Boardmans was pleasurable, Adoniram had little time for them, for Maria continued to sink rapidly. Four days after the return to AmherSt, at three in the afternoon of April 24, 1827, Maria Elizabeth Butterworth Judson died. She had lived two years and three months.

Adoniram and the Wades and Mrs. Boardman “closed her faded eyes and folded her little hands on her cold breast.” Boardman built her coffin himself.

The next morning [wrote Adoniram to Nancy’s mother] we made her last bed in the small enclosure that surrounds her mother’s lonely grave. Together they rest in hope, under the hope tree, which stands at the head of the graves; and together, I trust, their spirits are rejoicing after a short separation of precisely six months. And I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried; one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world,

“Where my best friends, my kindred, dwell,

Where God, my Saviour, reigns”?

The Death Prison and Oung-pen-la had claimed another victim.

Once again Adoniram threw himself into missionary work. He exhorted and debated with inquirers as of old. He made an as~ tronomical and geographical catechism to inform the Burmese about the world they lived in. He began the translation of Psalms. He considered how the enlarged missionary forces should be diSposed. With Amherst still shrinking and Moulmein growing, it was decided the Boardmans should settle in Moulmein on ground Sir Archi~ bald had offered for a mission station. They left in May. Adoniram joined them in August. The Wades and the native converts moved in November. At Moulmein Adoniram helped set up better facilities: a room in front of the new house for a zayat; a school for girls and one for boys; a ”reading zayat” conducted by Maung Shway-bay; and a “preaching zayat” conducted jointly by Wade and Maung Ing, who had returned from Tavoy; each zayat in its separate shed.

But these labors were largely mechanical. The fact was, the more work of this kind Adoniram did, the less it seemed to involve the real wellsprings of his thought and feeling. For deep inside, his energies were wrestling with a question which might be stated, so far as such questions ever can be stated: Why did he feel such overwhelming, persistent grief for an earthly 1055?

At times the belief that Nancy and the babies Roger and Maria were happier than they ever had been on earth would make him feel glad that they were in heaven, and he would yearn for the bright prospect of seeing them in the company of the angels. But then the shadows of appalling sadness and regret and loneliness would descend again. These shadows, like shadows in a darkling woodland, were interlaced in a confused pattern with strange haunting questions and guilty feelings of self-blame. What meaning, what purpose, lay behind the deaths of those he loved most? Did he carry death with him, like a contagion? In the beginning there had been Harriet Newell and her baby, and Newell, who had died a few years later in Bombay, a broken man. Then his own son Roger. Then Nancy. Now his daughter Maria. He hoped — he believed — he carried the gift of happy life eternal in the next world. But why did he carry the gift of death in this? And, most important: Since these dead were happy, why did he grieve?

Two additional deaths helped deepen these melancholy thoughts. In July Adoniram received Word that his father had died the previous November at Scituate, Massachusetts. Objectively, there was no reason why his father’s death should have distressed Adoniram unduly. Mr. Judson had reached the ripe old age of seventy-four, more than the Biblical three score and ten. He had adopted Adoniram’s denominational views and been a Baptist for the past ten years. He had become surprisingly prosperous for a poor minister of small income, for as money came to him (partly, apparently, through subdivision and sale of lands in Plymouth) he had invested in stocks of banks in and around Boston. At his death his estate was appraised at more than seven thousand dollars, of which fiftyfive hundred dollars was bank stock. All of this, except for twenty dollars to each son, he left to his widow and daughter, who were thus well provided for by the standards of the time.

But it was not these facts, which could well have called forth more admiration than grief for that stern, noble old man, which impressed Adoniram. What overwhelmed the son was a flood of poignant memories. All at once Adoniram recollected those glowing ambitions his father had held in front of his eyes from his earliest days. He remembered his father’s predictions that the child Adoniram would surely grow up to become a great man; his bitter despair when Adoniram became an “infidel”; his pride when Adoniram accepted the Gospel again at Andover; and his disappointment when Adoniram refused the assiStant pastorate of the Park Street Church in favor of a mission to Burma. Reliving these memories, Adoniram began to realize that no matter how he had rebelled, his father had succeeded in instilling in him, consciously or unconsciously, a goal of earthly ambition, an intense determination to surpass his fellows.

He began to suspect that his real motive in becoming a missionary had been not genuine humility and self-abnegation but ambition—ambition to be the first American foreign missionary; the first missionary to Burma; the first translator of the Bible into Burmese: first in his own eyes and the eyes of men.

He had a lust to excel. That was why he enjoyed the company of important men — ambassadors, generals — such as Crawfurd and Sir Archibald Campbell. He knew they liked and admired him, and their liking and admiration were like heady wine. In their company he glowed, and his wit flashed sparks like fire.

He had always known that his forwardness, self-pride and desire to stand out were serious flaws in his nature. Now he began to suspect that they were more than flaws. They made his entire missionary career up to now a kind of monstrous hypocrisy, a method of securing prominence and praise without admitting it to himself. He had deluded himself. But he had not deluded God. Perhaps here was the intention in all these deaths: to teach him true humility.

There was another death in September, that of the native sister Mah Men-lay. Almost half of her little wealth— one hundred and fifty rupees -— she had left to the missionaries. A letter from Amherst on one of her last days told Adoniram, “She is not inclined to converse much; but how delighted you would be to hear her, now and then, talk of entering heaven and of meeting Mrs. Judson, and of other pious friends! The other day, after having dwelt for some time on the delightful subject, and mentioned the names of all the friends she should rejoice to meet, not omitting dear little Maria, she stopped short, and exclaimed, ‘But first of all, I shall hasten to where my Saviour sits, and fall down, and worship him, for his great love in sending the teachers to show me the way to heaven.’ ”

To Adoniram, the letter must have been gall and wormwood. He and Nancy had converted Mah Men-lay in those long-ago days in Rangoon. Now she had looked forward to meeting Nancy, and Maria, and to thanking the Master in person for sending His Word through Adoniram. Adoniram had brought that Word — but through what motives!

No wonder it took death itself, by wholesale, to teach him better. For Adoniram’s mission, God had approval; for Adoniram and his self-love, a harsh lesson.

So it seemed.